Ad hoc Testing: How to find defects without formal testing process

In Software testing the term ‘Ad hoc testing’ is commonly used, which does not follow any structured way of testing. This type of testing is performed after the formal test execution. The Tester has the freedom to use his creative testing skills, and a better output can be obtained if Ad hoc testing is performed by only those who are more knowledgeable and experienced in specific domain/ system/application.

By performing this type of testing with well-experienced, domain expert tester we can find out new issues/bugs apart from formal test execution bugs as this testing has no boundaries or no structured plan. Ad hoc testing can be achieved with the testing technique called Error Guessing. Error Guessing can be done by people who have enough experience on the system to “guess” the most likely source of errors.

When do we do Ad hoc Testing?

When the testers do not have enough time on hand to do a detailed testing with proper test plans and test cases, they can do an Ad hoc Testing. By performing this type of testing on any application, one can get better output in terms of the product quality and can raise some design questions.

Types of Ad hoc Testing:

Buddy Testing: Two buddies work on the same module to identify defects. Out of the two, one is from the development team and the other from the testing team. This will help the tester to develop better test cases and also development teams can make design changes early, as time plays a major role in the IT industry.

Pair Testing: This testing is similar to buddy testing but here, both people are from the testing team but with different experience levels. While performing the testing, both should share their ideas depending on their experience levels and find the defects. Here one is a tester and the other is a scriber.

Monkey Testing: Testing an application randomly without any test cases with a goal to break the system comes under this testing.

Advantages:

• The main advantage of this type of testing is to check the completeness of testing and find more defects than the normal planned testing because the tester applies various innovative methods to test the application. While performing this type of testing, the tester can get some defect catching cases and those can be added to our normal planned test cases.
• As the time factor plays a major role in the IT industry, this testing method helps testers by saving a lot of time as it does not require an elaborate test planning, documentation and test case design.
• Those who are new to the testing field should use this as a platform to gain as much knowledge as possible to design better Ad hoc scenarios.

Drawbacks:

• As this type of testing does not follow a structured way of testing and no documentation is mandatory, the main disadvantage is that the tester has to remember all scenarios.
• The tester will not be able to recreate bugs in the subsequent attempts, should someone ask for issue reproducibility.

Ad hoc testing gives us knowledge on applications with a variety of domains.  And within a short time one gets to test the entire application, it gives confidence to the tester to prepare more Ad hoc scenarios, as formal test scenarios can be written based on the requirement but Ad hoc scenarios can be obtained by doing one round of Ad hoc testing on application to find more bugs, rather than through formal test execution.

(Venkatapavan Guptha works as QA Engineer at [x]cubeLABS. He has over 4 years of experience in Mobile and Web Applications and has expertise in testing domains like Healthcare and Gaming.)